Corel Draw 2018 Workspace reset

Not me, but one of the people I manage is having an issue where every month or so Corel seems to wipe her custom workspace out of nowhere. We can't seem to find any rhyme or reason as to why this is happening. We're aware you can hold down F8 when restarting corel to reset the workspace, but I don't believe that's what she's doing. 

I was actually present for one of the resets, corel had crashed (again) and after it closed down I restarted it myself to find everything set back to default without a hand on the keyboard. Has anyone else experienced this or could shed some light on why this could be happening?

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  • It would be the second case in your example that we're experiencing. Corel hasn't just activated the default workspace and left the user created one intact, allowing us to simply activate and continue to use it. 

    I have experienced something like that when I was first experimenting with customization by editing the workspace.XML file in the workspace. If I got something wrong there with the syntax, then I would not get any error message when starting CorelDRAW - but that custom workspace would be quietly reset to be the same as the Default.

    CorelDRAW stores a lot of workspace information in that .XML file, so it updates it frequently. If for some reason that file gets messed up, then I assume it would produce the same result as when I messed it up myself: silent reset to Default.

    I really can't guess what's causing this, so I'll move on to mitigating consequences!

    I really like my customized workspace in 2018, and I really, really don't want to ever rebuild it from scratch for 2018.

    As insurance, I fairly often run a FreeFileSync job that maintains a mirror of the folder containing my .CDWS files. Any time that a file is updated in or deleted from the mirror, the previous version is saved in a separate folder with a time stamp appended to the filename.

    If something bad were to happen to a workspace, I would go to the "versions" folder to get a version of the workspace file that predates the "something bad".